New testimony from career IRS officials revealed that the Director of the IRS Exempt Organizations division, Lois Lerner overruled the judgment of a career Washington, D.C. IRS lawyer and ordered Tea Party cases to go through a multi-layer review that included her senior advisor and the IRS Chief Counsel’s office.

“The chief counsel’s office for the Internal Revenue Service, headed by a political appointee of President Obama, helped develop the agency’s problematic guidelines for reviewing “tea party” cases, according to a top IRS attorney. In interviews with congressional investigators, IRS lawyer Carter Hull said his superiors told him that the chief counsel’s office, led by William Wilkins, would need to review applications that the agency had screened for additional scrutiny because of potential political activity.

FOX News reporter Carl Cameron told Bill O’Reilly tonight that House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) has information that will move the IRS scandal up into the White House. The committee is meeting on Thursday.

“What he said to me today was make sure to watch tomorrow’s hearing because he’s going to present the evidence to prove it…. That he can get it right up all the way into the White House before it was all revealed.”

What this new information means, Bryan Preston of PJ Medianotes, is that “Wilkins apparently knew of the abuse earlier than August 2011, because his own office was involved in it.”

His likely excuse: His staff went rogue and acted stupidly on their own. No one is ever in charge of, or accountable for, anything in Obama’s government, unless they’re in the military or otherwise expendable. Wilkins is probably too high to be expendable.

We’re getting ever closer to discovering that the White House through its counsel’s office was involved in, and probably directing, the abuse of citizens who were organizing to speak out against the Obama agenda. Catherine Engelbrecht’s case indicates that the IRS abuse is just one line of attack; the Obama government unleashed the full alphabet soup on her after she founded True the Vote.

That’s part of why Eric Holder has been unleashed on George Zimmerman. The right hand is hammering an innocent man while the left hand tries to wave Obama’s most dangerous scandal away. They’ll risk civil unrest to keep this particular scandal off the front pages.